A number of institutions expend considerable time and other resources in an effort to find, evaluate and hire employees. These efforts commonly include written employment application forms, personal interviews or a combination thereof. Each of these techniques involves committing company time and other resources and are associated with certain disadvantages.
The preparation of a written job application form requires an amount of company time particularly when it is desired to customize the solicitation of information to various different jobs. Filing out such a form also requires a time investment by an applicant, often greater than the time investment needed for e.g., orally answering questions, and thus could result in discouraging a number of desirable and qualified applicants. In addition to the time required to prepare the form, processing the written form requires time such as time for processing requests for application forms from potential applicants, selecting the proper form for a given job, mailing or otherwise distributing the form to applicants, receiving completed forms and, typically, transferring the data from the written form to another format such as data entry into a computer and/or reviewing the information presented in the written application form. Thus, the written application form procedure is not a "real time" procedure in the sense that the company does not receive the information from the applicant simultaneously with it being provided by the applicant (i.e. there is a delay involved in the applicant filling out the form and the company processing the data in the form). Processes which are not real time, in addition to typically requiring company time for such procedures as data entry, also inherently fail to provide an indication of how the applicant reacts under a time stress situation and provide relatively unreliable data regarding the applicant's responsiveness (e.g. for employment situations in which promptness of response is a factor in evaluating an applicant or awarding a job).
Personal interviews of job applicants can provide some degree of real time involvement, but have a number of disadvantages. Personal interviews require a substantial investment of time by company personnel conducting the interview. There is a potential, in personal interviews, for the interviewer to solicit information in an undesirable fashion. For example, the company personal conducting personal interviews may ask improper questions (e.g. questions which are not relevant to the particular job involved or which may violate legal or internal company standards, such as questions improperly relating to applicant's race, marital status and the like. Additionally, company personnel conducting personal interviews may exhibit a certain degree of inconsistency (particularly when different company personnel conduct interviews for the same job) e.g. by asking different questions of different applicants. Although many of these disadvantages can be reduced by establishing stringent training and supervision standards for interviewers, there is a cost associated with establishing such training and supervision standards. The cost of training and supervising interviewers is particularly acute when it is desired to provide different interview processes with respect to different jobs. Although personal interviews involve a degree of real time involvement, this is achieved by, typically, requiring the applicant to conform his or her schedule to that of the interviewer, and often by requiring the applicant to physically travel to a central interview location, both of which may discourage otherwise desirable and qualified applicants. Typically after a personal interview, it is necessary to evaluate the interview data which often requires the interviewer to provide written or other summaries of the interview, potentially introducing the possibility of interviewers (intentionally or unintentionally) misrepresenting the information provided by the applicant and requiring additional expenditure of time by company personnel.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to provide a job application procedure and apparatus which avoids discouraging potentially qualified applicants, particularly those that may be remotely located, reduces time and other company resource expenditures, even when it is desired to tailor the job application procedure to different jobs, provides for consistency and compliance with legal and company policies and provides a substantial degree of real time involvement by the applicant during the application procedure.